Corruption of Blood
by Right What Is Wrong
Summary: /AU/ Darth Vader puts together the truth about his captive. Oneshot.


**Author's Note: **Oneshot because following through on the extended plot would require more skill and a stronger stomach than I have.

* * *

The princess of Alderaan showed an admirable resistance to torture.

_(I knew you would come for me, Annie_._)_

Darth Vader blocked out the memory with practiced grace. The Jedi would jeer that the Sith let their emotions control them, but that was their foolish mistake: a Dark Lord of the Sith _used_ his emotions to his advantage. When they sought to cripple him, he discarded them as readily as anything else.

_(The Jedi turned against me... don't you turn against me...)_

Anything.

An emotion so well-worn it had become little more than annoyance flared in him as he crushed that memory beneath his mind's heel. He thought he had almost forgotten that. Perhaps it was something about how the woman's face twisted as the torture droid sent blazing signals down raw nerve endings. Or perhaps it was the grating way her breath hitched and gasped as she fought against the pain.

One dissident, one more grating aristocrat who worshiped a "democracy" that was nothing more than the elite playing at debate while the galaxy burned, resembled another. There was nothing more to it than that.

He tired of this game. If the senator wanted to hold fast to her sniveling convictions until the moment her sanity broke, he would indulge her. But that would come sooner rather than later.

Striding from the corner of the room to where she lay strapped to the table at the center, he reached out one mechanical hand, covered in its padded black leather glove, and clamped it on her head - it was mere happenstance that the angle blocked out her wretched face, nothing more. She made some indignant protest; were he feeling more charitable, he might admire her stubbornness.

No more. Her mind _would _break.

It should have.

Instead, when he swung down a gauntleted fist upon her mind, he found it skidding off a shield. An amateurish, shoddy shield, to be sure. She had never been trained.

But it deflected the blow to the side rather than permitting it to break her sanity into a thousand jagged pieces, and it trembled, but held fast. He could feel her fear. He could feel her pain.

More than that, he could feel her _anger_.

She was a Force-sensitive. Powerfully so. And she was a _natural_.

As he had been, so long ago. And not a natural Jedi. He drew back, decades of discipline overcoming his natural urge to retaliate or react in shock, and circled her mind carefully. Yes, there was the inner strength that had allowed her to resist torture. And it was not powered by her ideals after all - oh, she wanted to think that, she justified it to herself, in her moments clear of pain, as the strength of her convictions. But no.

It was her _hatred_. She hated him. Oh, how she hated him. How she hated him, and Tarkin, and every filthy puppet of the Imperial order on this horrible, monstrous ship. How she wished every single one of them would die, just as everyone on her homeworld had died. How, as she lay here writhing in agony, she wished she could inflict every ounce of suffering upon him that he inflicted upon her, returned tenfold.

Of course she justified it as him _deserving _it. One always justified the targets of one's hatred as _deserving_ it at first. To throw off the shackles of morality and acknowledge the hatred as an end in itself required... practice.

Her convictions, too, were fueled by hatred and wrath at the core. This was no high-minded, noble sadness as... that... woman... had practiced. She _hated_ what they had done to the Republic - not that this _little girl_ had ever known the Republic. No, she loathed the bad people from her father's fairy-tales of justice and dignity, knowing nothing of the rotten mass the Republic had truly been, and she spent her intellect stoking the flames of _righteous_ wrath at the Empire's abuses. Because it was good and right, of course.

But, beneath it all, she fed on the anger. It filled her heart, it stiffened her spine. It -

_(It gives you focus... makes you stronger...)_

...yes.

It was like looking into a mirror. Not as he was now, of course - strong of spirit, but crippled of body. Not a wise, hardened Dark Lord of the Sith. But the callow youth Anakin Skywalker, full of fire and spirit, all his Jedi _heroism_ fueled by that which he drew from a deep well of power, the nature of which he would not name -

The universe shifted.

A young woman who shared his immense native connection to the Force, and his immense native capacity for hatred. A young woman who had never known the Republic, because she had been born around the time of its fall. A young woman whose features brought back intolerable, indelible memories... Padme's features, or perhaps his mother's...

_See, Padme? I _told _you it was a girl._

On the heels of the inane thought came rage to blot out the stars.

They _had_ taken her from him. Not his wife. His _daughter_. A girl who had never betrayed him. Who _would_ never have betrayed him, had she been his to raise. Look at how loyally she clung to the trappings of her _stepfather's_ ideals: how much more devoted would she have been to the ways of a father who knew her nature as well as he knew his own?

Bail Organa had been fortunate to die along with the rest of his worthless planet. Were he now alive, Vader would have taken great pleasure in pulling him apart limb by worthless limb. His daughter. His _daughter_. _His._

_(YOU WILL NOT TAKE HER FROM ME!)_

And it had been no impulsive act of charity: the grand funeral for Padme was revealed for what it was, a sick show meant to disguise the successful salvaging of a live child. Why had that been so _important_ to them? Why had they kept the existence of his living child a secret in such a twisted, obscene way? They had no romantic ideals of smuggling the child away and keeping her safe from the horrors of politics and war, not when they paraded her as a Senator and indoctrinated her into becoming a hardened little hellion of the Rebellion. They had not done it for _her_ sake.

No, they had set her up as a leader and an idol. A political prodigy, a committed ideologue, and - _eventually_, no doubt - a talented Force-sensitive. A Heroine With No Fear.

Would they have revealed _then_ that she was the great Anakin Skywalker's secret daughter? Or had they merely wanted a Palpatine of the Rebellion?

It did not matter. Not a single miserable thought in all their worthless, witless minds mattered. What mattered was that he would find each and every one of the Rebels that had any knowledge of this plan and exact his vengeance upon them thoroughly and at length. He was no longer the petty, stupid youth that had taken Dooku's hands in revenge for his arm and then, at Palpatine's goading, taken his head. Two decades of lumbering through life as a mutilated, crippled husk, held together only by machinery and his own overwhelming power in the Force, had taught him a far more _nuanced_ understanding what it was to suffer.

Obi-Wan, in particular... Obi-Wan, who had taken _everything_ from him. His wife. His limbs. Even the knowledge that his daughter was _alive_. Cruel, vicious pettiness to equal any Sith. A man who had decreed him lost not for slaughtering the Temple, not for strangling his wife, not for betraying their brotherhood, but for denouncing the precious _Jedi_.

He would beg for a fate as merciful as he had given Vader, burning, screaming agony on an obsidian shore, limbless, helpless, mindless with pain. He would _beg_. In the past, Sith philosophy had led Vader to an ironically Jedi-like detachment towards his old master, ceasing to cling to petulant resentment and merely acknowledging hm as one of the Force's agents to rip away the pretty, poisonous veils between the eyes of a Sith acolyte and the searing truths of reality. That had been a mistake. Vader would now correct it. Whatever forsaken, backwater pit that harbored him - or whatever debauched pleasure-palace, if indeed his fellow conspirators had been creatures of the Senate - Vader would _find_ him, scouring the entire _galaxy_ if that was required, and then extract each and every moment of agony Obi-Wan had brought him from his old master's flesh and _more_.

But that, Vader reminded himself with a great effort of will, would be in the future. He must attend to matters at hand.

Curling the mechanical fingers, he petted his daughter's hair. Fear flared through the Force, quickly masked by redoubled revulsion and hate. Of course, she did not know it was _fatherly_ affection he had suddenly developed towards his captive. He considered toying with that, just to see if he could work her up to the sort of transcendent terror and fury necessary for an untrained prospect to touch the Force, then discarded the notion. He had _some_ standards.

His master had none, of course. His one assurance that Palpatine had honestly known nothing of the senator's true identity was that he had not seized upon her and discarded his old, mutilated apprentice in the same heartbeat. Vader would repay the favor. If he had an apprentice of his own - a reason to live beyond serving and refusing to give in to suffering - what need had he for the wizened old wizard on the throne? It was all a matter of the time, the opportunity, the act, an order given or a girder hurled...

Treachery was the way of the Sith.

He withdrew his hand. With a thought, the restraints holding the girl to the table clicked open. She stared at him, and the confusion was almost more terrifying to her than the torture had been.

"What's your game, Vader?" she demanded, her voice trembling - but she masked it well as indignation rather than fear. "Try whatever - mere _mind games_ you fancy, but you're wasting your time. There is _nothing_ you could do that could ever make me bend the knee to a foul beast like -"

"Consider your next words carefully," said Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith. "I could give you death. Or I could give you power enough to exact revenge on each and every quivering worm on this station, from the lowest technician to the Grand Moff himself. The choice is yours."

Then came the rage, of course, the storm and the fury and yet more indignation. But for a moment, before conscious thought could supervene, _hunger _flickered through her face and the Force, and he knew he had her.

The rest would be mere execution.


End file.
